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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Payments

[Sequal to Divers]

My name is Charlie. A normal one as
names go, and my life used to be normal too. Oh, it would be broken
if you saw my parents from the outside but broken is a kind of normal
too. Or was until dad brought a magician home with stories of the
monster in my closet. The magician walked into the closet and came
out with the monster. He said it was a god and said it would die
without me.

I ate it. More became it, I think, but
eating gods is what I do. In the past two weeks I've learned a lot of
crazy things and gone a little crazy myself. He says if I call up the
god-monster-me too often I won't be human anymore. Some days I'm not
sure human is something I want to be. Nothing new: every teenager
thinks that, but I don't think most can act on it.

Here's what I know: he is a magician,
and a magician is magic. It's a being more than a doing: he's pulled
to things, and pulls in turn and most of it just happens
with little more than a few words that have angles and depths words
don't normally have, or a smile. I've never thought of smiles as
being a poker-face until him. Magic is something he is; eating gods
is something I do.

Yesterday
was a god gone sour, reaching somewhere Other for power. I distracted
it by being me. He bound it with his shadow and collapsed after. He
barely woke this morning, and we don't have money to pay for another
night at the motel after this one. Money would just fall into his lap
if we needed it. Not
me. So I leave him sleeping and go walking.

Magic answers need,
but so do other things as well. Things not human, or playing at
human. Creatures gods are walls against. He won't tell me what I am,
not wanting to limit me (or just not to tell me; magicians are hard
to read) so I just walk through the town. It's close to midnight, the
prom of last night having given way to a dull silence. Power lines
hum overhead but most of the street lights remain broken from what
happened last night.

I walk and think
about magicians, and magic, and needing help. I don't think about
names: one doesn't need a magician to tell you names are power but I
prowl the entire town twice in an hour until the shadows finally
offer up –

I call up the god
in me without thinking. I have claws, then, and armour, but I can't
bear to use them and they slip away moments later like dreams I've
never had. The man that slips out of the shadows as if taking off a
dressing gown is tall and thin. That much makes sense. The rest: the
smile, the eyes of honey, the cheekbones – the cheekbones – the
curve of muscle and bone and steps, it's all something more. Past
beauty and into awe. I can't hurt him. I can't even hate him. I can
barely breathe. The god in me puts enough distance for that, anger
adds another distance.

"What are
you?" My voice is a betrayal, weak and cracked.

He smiles. It hurts wonderfully, and I
know he can be a she with that smile, and other things beside. His
voice is as warm as his eyes when he speaks. "A wanderer.
Seeker. Traveller. Ower of debt."

Ower is odd, and I cling to the
oddness. You spend your whole life thinking beauty is skin-deep,
knowing that's always a lie, and then something like this proves that
to be a lie. That's what this
creature is like. I think his pancreas would be a work of art, if he
had one. He's not a god. I think gods would worship him, and I don't
know why.

"The
magician." I don't make it a question, my voice hard even to my
ears.

His smile flatters
at some memory. "He is hurt?"

I say nothing.

He laughs then, and
the sound seems entirely human, distressingly normal. "You have
no idea how strong you are. Put away your claws, child, and I shall
put away mine."

I let go of the
god, letting the ragged edges of power slip down into my skin. It
feels like a toothache in the bones for a moment. "We don't
trust you."

He smiles and the smile is human,
whatever else he is dialled back for a moment. His beauty is bearable
but still not hateable. "It is not in my nature to be trusted.
But I do owe your magician friend for not banishing me. I can speed
his healing if he will allow it. But I cannot be trusted and cannot
be a friend."

"Swear you will not hurt him.
Swear it on something that matters."

The other raises one perfect smile.
"Such as?"

Something bubbles up, words of a song
I've never heard, echoes from the closet the monster lived in. My
voice is not mine when I speak: it is rough, hard and soft at once:
"Swear by the Cone and the Grave."

He pales and then offers up a tight bow
to me. "Very well. I so swear," without a trace of a smile
to him at all.

He says nothing at all on the walk back
to the hotel save to shoot wary looks my way from time to time as if
expecting to be struck. It doesn't make me feel at all strong, more
like I've beaten up the cutest puppy in the world. I want to ask what
the Cone and Grave are but keep my silence and open the door to the
room.

The magician is awake, eyes narrow and
hard, his smile tight with exhaustion in the bed.

"The Cone and
the Grave," the creature says in a voice like ground glass,
somehow sounding hurt.

The magician turns
his head to me, his expression unreadable. "You should go."

I back out and
close the door to see shadows and flesh melt together, neither voice
sounding entirely human. I recite songs, my times tables, poetry
drilled into me by English teachers. My voice is hoarse to my ears by
the time the door opens.

The creature that
emerges is slug-pale with claws of bone decorated in blood and a
smile of sharp teeth and sharper hunger. Its breath comes in small
pants, smile accompanied by a too-sharp tongue that darts out over
lips. "Little god-eater."

I step back and to
the side.

It smiles wider and
is somehow beautiful in uncertain light, tail the colour of its
tongue wrapped about its left leg.

I want things I
have no words for and shudder back from them. "Leave."

It
chuckles softly and walks past, turning human between moments of
awareness before stepping sideways into the air.

The magician is in
the bed when I walk back in, body covered in scratches and scars.
"Dawn will heal me," he says, voice rough, not meeting my
gaze. "Did he hurt you?"

"No," I
say, willing it to be true.

"It's
beautiful," he says, half to himself, "you could drown in
such a creature and it would be everything death can never be, so
perfect you'd die again just for it. You risked a lot for me."
He closes his eyes and sags back into the bed. "Thank you."

I just nod and sit
in the one arm chair; the dawn burns away all scars and blood as if
they never were at all. And I find myself crying as the magician
sleeps with no idea why.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”